5 Tricks for Taking Screenshot in Mac OS X

OS X beginner may always capture screen with its original screenshot function. Even though it is convenient and you can capture with only few shortcut keys. But there are still few unpleasant cases like all the captured pictures are PNG and will be saved on desktop.
We are going to introduce you 5 small tricks to capture screen. If you get familiar with all these 5 skills, you might be an expert of OS X screenshot. First let's review the 2 ways of OS X screenshot.

+Shift+3：Capture the full screen and save to the desktop. Photo will be labeled with "screenshot" then date and time.

+Shift+4：Capture a portion of the screen and you can adjust the size by dragging the mouse. Similarly, it will be saved on the desktop. Of course there are still many other shortcut keys combination for screenshot but the first 2 methods are the frequently used ones.

Trick 1: How to alter the default folder of the saved photos?

Screenshots mess up in desktop? We can try to alter the default folder for saving those pictures. For example, creating screenshots folder in photo library. Launch the terminal app, input defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/screenshot/ then the captured photo will be automatically saved in the new folder. Reboot SystemUIServer with this command killall SystemUIServer to make change into effect.

Named as "screenshot" for example.

Could be found in Finder-Utilities

Make sure to press space after location.

Drag the screenshot folder into the terminal window.

Click Return.

Copy killall SystemUIServer and hit Return

Trick 2: Change the photo format.

The default captured-photo format is PNG but it's always rather large in size. If you want a smaller size one JPG would be a better choice. Input this command defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg and the captured photo would be saved as JPG. Similarly reboot SystemUIServer to make it effective(killall SystemUIServer).Moreover, you can save the photo in any format you want by changing "jpg" in the command to "gif", "tif", "pdf" and default "png".

Trick 3: Set time for special screenshot.

Grab helps you to capture difficult-captured photo. Go to Dock-Utilities-Grab, click Capture in the menu bar and choose Timed Screen. Screen will be auto-captured in 10 seconds. If you want to reset the time, input this command screencapture -T 3 osxdaily.jpg(for example 3 seconds).

Trick 4: Capture mouse pointer or capture customized mouse pointer.

There are other practical functions of the Grab like you can customize your mouse pointer in Preference then capture as the above timed screen method.

Trick 5: Adjust the screenshot area.

+Shift+4+space: as we know command+shilf+4 enable you to capture a portion of the screen , but if you want to adjust the screenshot area then press the space bar at the same time.